


Cry For Judas

by little_murmaider



Series: I Hope You Die. I Hope We Both Die. [5]
Category: Metalocalypse (Cartoon)
Genre: Bitter Exes Have a Very Measured Conversation Before the Apocalypse, Canon Divergent - Magnus Lives, Hospitalization, M/M, post-doomstar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:33:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26832232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/little_murmaider/pseuds/little_murmaider
Summary: "But I am just a broken machine, and I do things that I don't really mean."
Relationships: Nathan Explosion/Magnus Hammersmith
Series: I Hope You Die. I Hope We Both Die. [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/889653
Comments: 12
Kudos: 23





	Cry For Judas

Magnus wakes up in a white, windowless room. He is warm, and he is alone.  
  
A dull ache emanates from his chest, his body too stiff and brain too fuzzy to figure out why. Colorful wires bind him to a menagerie of humming machines. There are no clocks, no way to figuring out how long he’d been here. The moment he’s alert, a cabal of hooded figures flood the room, typing furious notes into their digital tablets. He asks where he is. No answer. If this is supposed to be hell, he’s pretty disappointed. He expected his eternal punishment to be a bit more _Inferno_ -esque. Boiled in blood, frozen in a lake up to his head, buried in excrement, that sort of thing. At the very least he thought he’d get something akin to a Meatloaf album cover.  
  
One of the figures slams a needle into his forearm and it’s lights out.  
  
When he wakes up again, Nathan looms at the end of his bed.   
  
“Hi, asshole.”  
  
Magnus blinks him into focus. “Where am I?”  
  
“Uh, a hospital?” He points to a blood-red sign behind him that reads **HOSPITAL** . “Obviously?”  
  
Magnus looks down. A thin baby blue gown clings to his sweat-drenched form, the barest hint of a bandage poking over the collar. His legs and waist are secured to the bed with multiple thick velcro straps. He lifts his arms and finds them wrapped in what appear to be white, padded sacks, secured tight around his wrists like thumbless boxing gloves.  
  
Nathan snickers.  
  
“They thought you might rip out your tubes while you were sleeping so they put you in those bad boy punishment mitts.” He clinks his fingers to his thumbs like a surly cartoon crab.  
  
“I…” The realization hits him like a sledgehammer, and he nearly chokes on the word. “I _died_ .”  
  
Nathan shrugs.  
  
“ _We can rebuild you_ ,” he intones in a voice deeper than his normal one. “ _We have the technology._ Heh. That’s a tired joke, but I don’t get a lot of opportunities to use it.”  
  
“Why am I here?” He asks, again.  
  
“Who knows? If it were _my_ call, you’d be rotting at the bottom of a pile of rubble right now. But.” He looks askance and rakes his fingers through the roots of his hair. “Charles says your role in _the prophecy_ is still unfinished, so. Here you are. Back from the dead.”  
  
Magnus’s hands tense against their padded confines. “Prophecy…?”  
  
“You should be thrilled,” Nathan says. “You always did see yourself as a Christ figure.”  
  
A long moment passes. There’s the shuffle of movement outside the door, a hushed admonishment and a soft apology, then silence. Magnus polishes the back of his teeth with his tongue, the taste gummy and sour.  
  
At last he says: “How’s Toki?”  
  
Whatever spark of amusement Nathan found in this situation vanishes and rage lights him up like a firecracker. He swarms to his bedside and prods him in his still-raw chest.  
  
“ **_You_ ** don’t get to ask that.”  
  
“ _Aah_ , man…”  
  
“Keep his name out of your fucking mouth or I swear to _God_ I’ll break your legs. Charles said we need you alive, he didn’t say we need you to _walk_ .”  
  
“ _Jeez_ fine, man, alright.” Magnus holds up his mitts in what he hopes is a placating manner. “Just curious, is all.”  
  
“Yeah, I’m sure you’re real curious about the well being of the guy you _stabbed_ and _kidnapped_ as part of your **_half-baked plot for revenge_ ** . Cause you’re _sUuUuUuUuUuch_ a _good friend_ .”  
  
“Hey! I’m—” He pauses. A faint tingle of regret skitters across the back of his neck.“I _was_ . At one point. I think I was.”  
  
Nathan hovers over him a moment longer, then stands to his full height.  
  
“He’s a good kid,” Magnus continues. “Terrible judge of character. _Waaaaay_ too trusting. But a good kid.” He frowns in contemplation. “It wasn’t all not real.”  
  
Nathan folds his arms across his chest and sinks his weight into his heels.  
  
“But _most_ of it was.”  
  
Magnus exhales a throaty chuckle that rolls into a sustained, hacking cough.  
  
“Doesn’t seem to matter what I say about it,” he wheezes. “You’ve clearly settled on the answer you want.”  
  
Nathan looks away. Save for the mechanical whirrs and staccato beeps of the medical machinery, the air is still. Magnus tucks his chin to his chest to better behold his should-be-mangled body. The body looks old—a pasty skeletal husk. If he weren’t attached to it, he’d have a hard time believing it was his own.  
  
Perhaps it’s because the pleasant numbing fog of the pain meds is starting to ebb, but a hot knife of righteous fury cuts him to the core. He remembers what was meant to be his final moment on Earth—the push of air leaving his lungs; the cold scratch of concrete beneath his cheek; the sudden image of his mother looking out at him from the front window of his childhood home; the glimmer that at last he’d done something meaningful with his sad, miserable little life; the darkness.  
  
He died with no one to mourn him, and returned to even less.  
  
“Are you going to fucking cry?” Nathan sneers. “Can you not? I’ve dealt with that enough this week from Skwisgaar.”  
  
“You take,” he says slowly, “ _everything_ from me.”  
  
“Oh, here we go…”  
  
“Everything I’ve worked for, everything I’ve _earned_ , has been wrongfully stripped from me by _you_ and your **_ilk_ ** .”  
  
“Ilk? Really?”  
  
“Dethklok is a world-destroying hydra, born of _arrogance_ , and _apathy_ , and _late-stage capitalism_ . And I! Was going to stop it **_I!!!_ ** Was going to _kill_ the beast and at last be _celebrated_ the way I _deserve_ . As a hero! A champion!”  
  
Nathan listens intently, nodding along with a comically exaggerated pout. With one hand he drags his index finger down his cheek, mimicking the course of a sad, solitary tear. With the other he makes a violent jerk-off motion.  
  
“Maybe I made some mistakes. Maybe I shouldn’t have befriended Tooooooo—”  
  
Nathan makes a fist.  
  
“— _my replacement_ , under false pretenses. Maybe I shouldn’t have aligned with a terrorist organization. Maybe I shouldn’t have committed,” he puts his hands up to make finger quotes but, remembering the mitts, bends his forearms forward as if fanning a large flame, “ _light treason_ . These are things we can only see in hindsight. But _everything_ I did was for the greater good.”  
  
Nathan barks a laugh. “The greater good? That’s the line you’re going with?”  
  
“You wield _unfathomable_ global power. You’re making the most significant scientific advances known to man. You can _bring people back from the dead_ . And that’s all in addition to the fact that you are _a literal god_ .”  
  
“Yeah, uh.” Nathan scratches at the bridge of his nose, face screwing up self-consciously. “Let’s, uhhh. Can we put a pin in all the god stuff? Kinda still...kinda still processing that…”  
  
“You could have fixed the climate, fixed weath inequality, fixed healthcare a thousand times over, but you _didn’t_ , and you _won’t_ .” Magnus’s lips curl around a snarl. “You’ve never done _anything_ for the benefit of anyone but yourself.”  
  
“Hey, I bought my dad a boat.”  
  
Magnus sniffs. “If you came down here looking for an apology, then I’m sorry—”  
  
“This oughta be good."  
  
“—that I’m the only one who truly sees who you are.”  
  
Nathan cups his palm over his left eye socket. “That must be tough.”  
  
“You mock me but the reality is I am a _victim—_ ”  
  
“Stop, no, shut up, don’t even finish the sentence.” Nathan paces to the end of the bed and lays his hands on the railing. “Let’s get one thing straight: You are not a victim. You _have_ victims.”  
  
“But I—”  
  
“You did bad things, for bad people, and that makes you a bad person. Ishnifus _died_ because of you!”  
  
Magnus cocks his head to the side. “I don’t know who that is.”  
  
“Ishnifus!” Nathan sputters. “He’s the! He’s the guy, with the…” He deflates, gesturing vaguely at the space above his head. “With the hat?” A beat. “Those zombie things ripped his guts out?”  
  
“Ohhhhh right right right.”   
  
Nathan grips the bed rail again.  
  
“You might be able to delude yourself but you can’t fool me. I _know_ you.”  
  
Magnus glares. “You _think_ you know me.”  
  
“I’ve always known you.” He leans forward so the muscles twitch in his shoulders and neck. “You’re a warped, frustrated old man too consumed by his ego to recognize that the only thing notable about him is his aggressive mediocrity.”  
  
Magnus opens his mouth to reply but all words die on his tongue.  
  
“What…” Nathan straightens, scrubbing his face with the heel of his hand. “What even was the _plan_ , dude? Your big revenge plot was to, what, _redistribute our wealth?_ Was that _actually_ the plan or is that just what you’re _saying_ the plan was because your real plan made _no fucking sense_ ?”  
  
“It made sense if you knew all the steps which only I did!”  
  
“Okay, what were the steps?”  
  
“I don’t see how that’s relevant.”   
  
“Alright, Lennon,” Nathan scoffs, then mumbles under his breath, “Bet it’s easy for _you_ to imagine no possessions. Because you don’t own shit.”  
  
Magnus squints. “Whaaaat…” Comprehension clicks into place. “Do you think _John Lennon_ and _Vladimir Lenin_ are the same person?”  
  
Nathan’s eyes dart to the side.  
  
“No.”   
  
“Do you think **Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, head of the Soviet Union,** also wrote **_Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite?_ ** ”  
  
“Shut up!”  
  
The moment hangs between them like carcasses at a slaughterhouse. The silence breaks with another long, wet cough from Magnus. When he finishes, he catches his breath, holds it, and says:  
  
“So if I’m a bad person.” His voice is raggety and thin. “What does that make _you, Nate_ ?”  
  
“A guy! I’m just a guy!”  
  
“If doing bad things for good reasons makes me a bad person, what does it mean if you have the _capacity_ to do good and _choose_ not to?”  
  
“I never claimed to be good!” Nathan is shouting. “All I wanted to do is make metal and make money and make…” His eyebrows pinch as he frowns. “...fuck, making fuck, sex, I wanted to have a lot of sex. I didn’t _ask_ for all this.”  
  
“But you _have_ it!” Magnus is shouting, too. “And you’re doing _nothing_ with it! You could be using your extensive, _considerable_ resources to make the world better for _everyone_ , but you _won’t_ and _that_ makes _you_ a bad person.”  
  
Nathan flicks his wrist dismissively.  
  
“Spare me your _poor little proletariat_ act.”  
  
“I’m surprised you even know how to _pronounce_ that word,” Magnus rolls his eyes, “let alone use it correctly.”  
  
A wheeled tray launches through the air and crashes dangerously close to the medical machinery.  
  
“ **DON’T** do that.” Nathan’s eyes flash, and in an instant he’s back at Magnus’s bedside, pushing his face so close little specks of spittle pepper Magnus’s jaw. “Don’t **fucking** do that. I hate it. You used to do that _all the time_ . You’d make me feel so _stupid_ and I’m **not** .”  
  
Magnus hears his voice crack. Nathan hears it too and winces, embarrassment flushing his cheeks. He turns away and slams the side of his fist into the wall, the forceful _thump_ leaving a lingering echo.   
  
When it fades out Nathan says, quietly: “I’m not stupid.”  
  
“No, you’re not,” Magnus replies, feeling every bit as old as he is. Nathan glances at him over his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”  
  
Nathan sighs.  
  
“Look.” He gnaws at his lower lip. “I didn’t come down here to act out some, fucking, _morality play_ with you. Things are about to break bad, like, _cosmically_ , and I don’t have time to be pissed at you anymore. So I came down here because.”  
  
He hesitates, but when he speaks again he sounds gentler than Magnus has heard him in years.  
  
“They said you were alive and, despite everything, there’s still a very, very, _very_ small part of me that wants you to stay that way.” He grimaces and makes for the exit. “Maybe I really am stupid.”  
  
But before he goes, Magnus notices something.  
  
“What’s that in your back pocket?”  
  
Nathan doubles back, just as surprised as Magnus to find something poking out from the back of his jeans. “Oh. Right.” He strides back to the bed. “I uh. Figured you wouldn’t be getting many visitors and thought, uh. You might want something to read.”  
  
Nathan unfastens the velcro straps securing one of Magnus’s security mitts, sliding it off and granting him the freedom to remove the other. As Magnus flexes his fingers, Nathan drops a worn, dog-eared copy of _Moby Dick_ onto the bed.  
  
“Old man is driven to madness chasing after a thing that ultimately kills him?” His tone is biting but affectionate. “Seemed appropriate.”  
  
Magnus thumbs through the velvety soft pages, runs his nail of the tear on the back cover. Recognition softens him.  
  
“You kept this?” He asks, disbelieving. “After all these years?”  
  
“Guess so.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
Nathan lifts and drops his shoulders.  
  
“What else was I going to do with it?” he says, and heads once more for the door.

The perfectly-repaired organ beating in Magnus’s chest swells.  
  
“You know, Magnus says, stopping Nathan in the threshold. “This print is pretty small. And my eyes.” He pauses. “Well. _Eye_ . Isn’t what it used to be. Maybe if you come down here again,” he shakes his head to toss a curl off his forehead, “you can read it to me.”  
  
A smile ghosts across Nathan’s lips.  
  
“Maybe,” he says, and leaves.   
  
Magnus doesn’t know what it was Dethklok INC stuck in his chest. Maybe it’s a cool new robot heart, maybe it’s a bomb. Whatever it is, Magnus now has no doubt it’s capable of feeling all sorts of things. Hope, forgiveness, love. Maybe it’s love. At the very least, it’s the best simulation money can buy.   
  



End file.
